Korea Dividing Line Cuts Deep After 36 Years

August 29, 1989|By Uli Schmetzer, Chicago Tribune.

AT THE 38TH PARALLEL, KOREA — Behind a spiked iron gate, an electric fence and six poplar trees spreads one of the world`s hottest Cold War patches, where communism and capitalism have bickered, bartered and barked at each other for 36 years.

The white cranes pecking in the cornfields, the ancient ox cart, the peasant women shoulder-deep in rice paddies and the white-capped hills provide a tranquil backdrop to the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, which bristles with hostility and electronic gadgets on both sides.

The last yellow signpost before the gate on the North Korean side reads:

``70 kms to Seoul.`` It was there when the North invaded the South in 1950, when United Nations forces pushed them back and when American GIs advanced and retreated during the bloody Korean War.

Technically, North and South Korea, divided by the 38th Parallel, are still at war. The armistice signed on July 27, 1953, was never followed by a peace treaty.

An estimated 1 million troops, 40,000 of them from the United States, still face each other across this parallel where the South has built a 200-mile-long wall of concrete. Seoul says the wall is meant to keep the communists at bay; Pyongyang regularly complains that ``imperialist spy flights`` violate its sovereignty.

Behind the gate, manned by armed Northern troops in their brown uniforms, a paved road meanders through fruit orchards and across little creeks for exactly 1.24 miles to the ankle-high concrete strip that is the line of no return for both sides.

The pungent smell of ripe melons permeates the air and cicadas shrill in the trees. Unarmed soldiers on guard along the route snappily salute as a group of foreign reporters approach; and a farmer, open-mouthed at the invasion of his official no-man`s land, pushes a wheelbarrow into a tree.

More than 1,000 North Korean villagers live in the DMZ, tending their fields while keeping an eye on the ``imperialist warmongers`` nearby. Sometimes one of them steps on an old land mine and adds to the casualty toll of a war that doesn`t want to end.

Somewhere in the open countryside the South and North Korean flags flutter from two hills just 50 feet apart.

``When the Americans put up a flag and claimed our fields were theirs, our villagers became angry and put up our flag to show them,`` explained the official guide who, like all Northerners, sees the U.S.-rather than its

``puppet government in Seoul``-as the root of all evil on the border.

The DMZ has a logic all its own. Each antenna erected on one side is immediately matched on the other. When the two Koreas discuss armistice violations under the auspices of the UN, the delegates meet in long, low-slung sheds built across the dividing line with exactly half of the shed on each side.

A stairway leads from the massive North Korean border building down to the sheds. Between Shed Two and Shed Three an elevated strip of concrete marks the border.

``As civilians you can cross the line and wander around, but don`t enter any building or the South will snatch you,`` North Korean Col. Yu Sok Kwa explained to the visiting journalists.

So far, he said, only 103 people, all of them lost fishermen and pilots, had been repatriated across the line. Requests from both sides to guarantee the security of anyone who crosses are stonewalled.

The North this month made six unanswered requests to the South to guarantee the safety of Im Su Kyong, a South Korean student, and a Catholic priest, Rev. Moon Gyu Hyun.

Im, known in the North as ``the Flower of Reunification,`` and Father Moon this month became the first South Koreans in 36 years to cross the line deliberately to protest a Seoul law that says anyone who visits the North can be sentenced to a hefty term in jail on charges of treason. They are in custody now in the South.

No love is lost on either side.

``The violations of the Americans are constant,`` complained Lt. Col. Yun Ki Un, the North Korean delegate to the border commission. ``Very often they refuse to wear the compulsory armbands. We have counted more American personnel than permitted, and they carry automatic weapons when only 20 army pistols are allowed for each side. Sometimes they fire automatic weapons inside the demilitarized zone.``

A short, fox-like man with lively eyes, he leaned forward and added confidentially, ``And they have smuggled girls into the conference huts.``

The soil here is drenched with the blood of 54,000 Americans and at least half a million Koreans who died in the war that began on June 25, 1950.

The bloodshed has ended, but the suspicion and high state of alert remain.

The rules governing the DMZ are mind-boggling. They are contained in volumes articulated over nearly four decades of hostile confrontation.

In this climate it was almost a relief to see a college student and a priest ridicule and defy the preposterous 38th Parallel by simply crossing it while a South Korean army captain bellowed at them through a bullhorn: ``Don`t cross! You will be prosecuted. Go back immediately!``

The irony was that the priest and the young woman were not running away from the North, but coming home to the South.